All across the blogosphere and tweetscape, people have been crying out for transparency, open government, and easy access to legislative data. The Obama Administration has pledged to create a more transparent and connected democracy. A major part of this initiative involves making government data and research available on the soon-to-be-launched website Data.gov. Legislators and government officials have been preparing for this change by soliciting advice from the tech citizenry on the best (and coolest) ways to distribute bulk data to the public.
Azavea is listening.
And tweeting ... and blogging. We're committed to participating in conversations about open government, and we think we can play a role in helping people make sense of millions of records of government data about to inundate them.
Cicero is our district matching and elected official lookup web API. We've been working hard to make it better and faster, and bigger -- a supersized government data tool, if you will. Our most recent upgrades to the web service and database include faster map generation (as demonstrated in our newly released, free CiceroLive site), newly redistricted legislative boundaries, the addition of new local city council assemblies (Orlando, Atlantic City, Tulsa, and Berkeley to name just a few), all US governors, as well as national watershed boundaries at the HUC10 and HUC12 levels. We're also keeping track of the plans local and state governments are making to tweak legislative boundaries after the 2010 Census. Redistricting will be a huge issue in the open government world over the next few years, and we're ready for the flood of maps and data that will need to be generated.
Cicero is part of an exciting new trend in public engagement by online media outlets. As news organizations struggle to survive in a tough economy and compete for dwindling readership, they are finding a wide variety of innovative ways to pull traffic to their online news sites. Political data tools are a big draw.
For example, The New York Times recently released 'Represent', a district and news lookup tool for the five New York boroughs. 'Represent' enables New Yorkers to type in their address and receive a list of their elected officials (down to the neighborhood association level) and maps of New York political districts. Users can click on the name of an elected official and read all the Times articles that include a mention of that official.
The Oregonian, a newspaper serving Portland and its suburbs, has also been offering their online readers more innovative ways to follow politics. On November 4, 2008, the day of the national elections, Their Oregon Legislature page used the Cicero API to make election results more local, relevant, and exciting. Readers could enter their address into The Oregonian's Cicero-driven political web tool and then watch live tallies of votes for key political races in their legislative districts.
What's next? Want to participate in the conversation?
http://twitter.com/CiceroAPI
